bash on windows update

I looked into it this morning, and many people have tried this out. I went with the last of those three links, because it spoke of Unix Utilities and it was just a "download, extract, set PATH" sort of install process, which is one I grok.

Unfortunately, it didn't exactly pan out. I posted at TechSutram's blog (where I got the instructions from):

I just followed these instructions - I'm quite happy to have some additional unix utils on my command line (cat, less, rm) - but I could not get bash itself to work.

It will run fine, but reports "bash: warning: could not find /tmp, please create!" - I tried creating a "tmp" within C:\Users\myusername (where I set my HOME environment to), and also within C:\bash, but this did not stop the error.

Not so bad though, right? Just a warning. Well, actually it's worse: immediately after opening bash, a command like "ls" will display files in the good old fashioned style, then dump this to me: "[sig] C:\bash\bash.exe 1000 (0) call_handler: couldn't get context of main thread, error 998", and hang. After a CTRL+C, you end up with "[sig] bash 1000 (28) call_handler: couldn't get context of main thread, error 998", and now the terminal is entirely nonresponsive.

I'm running 64-bit Win7 Ultimate on an Intel Core2, about 4gb of ram and the rest is unimportant. I'm guessing this is a 64-bit issue or just a "Win7 is different" issue, which is causing some DLL call to fail or return differently and muck things up.

And I'm happy with the situation to some extent. I've now got the ability to string some bashfu together on my command line, and I'm closer to having UNIX available on this crazy Windows stuff, but I'm not quite there.

I'll keep looking, and if I find something that's not 2+ years old or broken, I'll report back.